Even if Speaker John Boehner’s “Plan B” tax proposal, a fiscal cliff negotiating ploy that raises taxes on those making a $1 million per year but preserves cuts for everyone else, had passed the House it would never see a Senate vote according to Majority leader Harry Reid.

And even if it passed in the Senate, President Barack Obama has promised to veto it.

So the only reason the House would move forward with a vote on Thursday night was, one assumes, for tactical reasons. As Karl Rove, writing in the Wall Street Journal, observed, Boehner would evidently deny “President Obama the easy target he thought he had in the post-election GOP. The speaker has undercut the White House’s strategy of attacking congressional Republicans as do-nothing troglodytes and kept his party unified in a situation with no easy or obvious answers.”

I’m skeptical that voting for a tax increase will give Republicans any leverage in the fiscal cliff negotiations, but, and I’m no Machiavelli, I’m pretty sure you have to pass the bill to make the messaging stick.